My Expat Life in Cancun, Mexico

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Reader Photo Requests: Outside My Front Door

Moving along with Reader Photo Requests: My follower and Facebook friend Joe asked me to post the first thing I see when I walk out my front door every morning.

I love my front patio. It’s the main reason we plan to continue renting our current house for a long time. Even my neighbor across the street has a plant-filled yard, so from my living room I can look out the front window and pretend we live in a garden fairyland. Cancun is a city known for its teeny-tiny front and back patios, most of which are all concrete, so we’re very lucky to actually have a backyard and front planters where we can practice our gardening.

I will be posting updated patio photos soon because I got several house tour requests, so hang tight for awhile and you’ll see how it has grown.

Every morning, I walk out my front door and stop to check on the progress of my orchid tree before I walk out the front gate. We bought this tree last year thinking it was just a plant until blog reader Pauline informed me that it was, in fact, a tree. We have left it in our front patio planter ever since, but the plan was always to take down the tree in the backyard and replace it with the orchid tree. On Saturday we had the last of the old tree trunk removed from the backyard, but since our gardener put in some serious weed killer, we’re going to wait a week or two before transplanting the orchid tree into its place of honor in the backyard.

For now the orchid tree looks a bit out of place and the planter is overcrowded, but that will all change soon.

Here it is in the early morning light. I love the specks of light coming through our copa de oro tree.

The flowers on this tree are absolutely gorgeous, and they seem to bloom year-round here in the tropics. They grow in bunches. When 1 bunch has died out, there are always several new ones to take its place.

Our little orchid tree is a fighter! Our landlords came to paint the front of the house a few months ago, and they moved a few plants around while they were here. For some reason, the landlord actually cut the entire plant down to its roots. Jorge asked him why he did that and he couldn’t really answer… weird… so anyway we’re really glad that the orchid tree has come back in full force so quickly!

Love your planter box – can’t wait to watch that orchid tree grow into it’s full potential.
I’m obsessed with lupine (http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosiero:Lupine_rot.jpg). They are super fricken picky and HATE to be transplanted… so right now I have 6 plants in my yard, all new this year, that I’m babying to no end. I want these suckers to come back next year. Steve and I are also going to follow the process for how to grow them from seed by putting seeds in the ground in the fall (they need cold and wet to germinate). So hopefully next spring there will be many of these Lupine plants popping up all over my yard! They look gorgeous as a ‘field’ of Lupine (http://www.edenbrothers.com/store/media/product-images/LupineRussel.jpg)